Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Empire that rules over us like all others before it has resorted to lies to keep the society together. In a small community trust is like the mortar that holds separate bricks together to form one cohesive and enduring building. Yet even the dimmest bulb can clearly see that America is failing to function and is near collapse.

We have reached a point where the lies are no longer believed by the majority. In the preceding sentence I left out the word citizens because Empires do not have citizens with rights. Everyone below the rank of Emperor is a slave.

In modern America if you are not a billionaire like Lloyd Blankfein, Blythe Masters, Jamie Dimon or Rupert Murdoch, you might as well be a landless peasant under Ivan the Terrible or a black slave in 1827.

If you are under the illusion that you are a free man or woman, please go to any airport and explain to the TSA that you are a citizen of the American Republic and that the Bill of Rights protects you against all unreasonable searches and seizures without due process of law and probable cause
In keeping with Fukushima I will say that America is at a point where we are reaching critical mass and the lies will on their own ignite into a fireball of sustained reaction bringing down the old regime and freeing the commoners to form a Second Republic.

I will list and briefly explain a few of the more obvious lies. I will then explain how we can tie all of these lies together into one whole that will take the Empire down.

I think the father of lies in America has to be the Federal Reserve. It is a privately owned bank. Yet it issues our currency. Imagine that you were a counterfeiter and had a license to lawfully print all the Federal Reserve Notes you wanted provided you only circulate your bogus dollars by loaning them either to the government , to businesses or to individuals

Since you only printed enough dollars to pay back the principal and not the interest, each year you must print exponentially more money until all nations who tolerate your fraud are burdened with a Debt Bomb that can only be canceled through either a 1923 Wiemar Republic style hyperinflation or a 1933 type of Deflationary Depression.

The Russian demographer Borisov said millions died of starvation in the American Great Depression.

But why would you expect a banker to care about you and your family?

The next lie is the Myth of the Balanced Budget and the two party system. The hicks and boobs are allowed to choose between two parties both of which have candidates approved for them by Wall Street.

Yet we have a banking system written by Wall Street which does not allow us to create money so we can buy and sell unless we have first accepted a loan.

This means if the Right and Left ever agreed to savagely cut benefits and wars and passed a confiscatory tax on all savings and pensions, we would cancel all 20 trillion dollars in US debt and the bonds guaranteed by Fannie Mae and the other agencies.

At that point, we would not have any money because repaying a debt cancels money in circulation under the Federal Reserve system. We would not have a currency until we agreed to borrow more counterfeit money from the bankers.

We are in a very deep hole dug for us by Wall Street who knew there was no way out for us in 1910 when at a private meeting the bankers wrote the legislation that created the Federal Reserve.

The bankers will not allow you to freely discuss any rational solution that will work. They will allow morons to prattle on foolishly to let you think that the First Amendment still applies.

The third lie has to be the Kennedy assassination. The first thing I would say of his murder is that it occurred on November 22nd. Look at every book on the Kennedy assassination and try in vain to find the following point:

The Federal Reserve legislation was written by a private group of bankers at Jekyll Island in November of 1910. But their first meeting was held on November 22nd in the private rail car that took the conspirators from New Jersey to Georgia.

JFK signed Executive Order 11110 which ordered the Treasurer to print US Banknotes to replace Federal Reserve Notes. These debt free notes were taken out of circulation as soon as JFK was dead. If he had lived, we could have a debt free currency and live in a nation without a national debt or a Debt Bomb hanging over us.

If you see anything about the JFK assassination which does not include the fact that the President was murdered on November 22nd as a warning to every American that Wall Street controls your money and is allowed to steal every last dime, then ignore it.

I would however lend some credence to what Mordecai Vanunu said about Israel killing JFK because he opposed a nuclear arms race in the Mideast. He also wanted the predecessor to AIPAC to register a a foreign lobby.

Israel was allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and AIPAC was never forced to register as agents of a foreign power after his death.

The next lie is such a whopper that I doubt even the biggest cretin on network TV would believe it though they know better than to allow us to discuss it on air. The lie would be that there are auditing procedure in place to prevent evil people from systematically looting federal spending.

You have probably seen the September 10th, 2001 interview with Donald Rumsfeld on CBS in which he admits he could not trace 2.3 trillion dollars in Department of Defense spending. He promised us that he would institute some kind of accounting procedures so we could trace the taxpayers money at an undisclosed future date.

Rabbi Dov Zakheim was the Comptroller of the Pentagon on 9-11. He had 600 military and civilian personnel busily trying to trace that money when according to April Gallop, a third generation soldier, Lt Colonel Karen Kwiatowski USAF and Robert Andrews, a former Green Beret who was Acting Assistant Director of the DOD for Special Operations, a bomb exploded killing the men and women attempting to recover the 2.3 trillion dollars that persons unknown had stolen. That was before what was alleged to have been Flight 77 struck the building.

So why no mention of this bomb in the mainstream news? So why were no crime scene photos of the interior of the Pentagon ever released?

I would be remiss in not pointing out the work of Catherine Austin Fitts who has revealed that tens of billions were sucked out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She once found one single block in San Diego with ten loans totaling 20 million dollars on buildings that never existed.

Catherine said that Wall Street is systematically looting the taxpayers of trillions of dollars which they are sending overseas and investing in drug money laundering and other schemes so they can buy America for pennies on the dollar and turn you into the slave they obviously think you are.

The next lie is that 19 Arabs with box cutters hijacked four airliners on 911.

I once posted a list of the passengers and crew from the four planes as originally published by CNN.
Surprise. Surprise. There were no Arabs on any of the planes. The list of 19 Arab names was conveniently found in the trunk of a car along with obligatory copies of the Qur’an. As if possession of the Qur’an were proof of a crime.

So how did those 19 men get past the ticket agents without IDs, boarding passes and tickets?

Some have speculated about Rabbi Dov Zakheim. Before he was Comptroller of the DOD in charge of the missing trillions of dollars, he was CEO of SPC International which made the Command Transmitter System. This allowed one operator to remotely control multiple planes. They say this is how three of the four planes reached their targets without qualified pilots on board.

Mike Rivero has speculated that Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania because the pilots and crew had broken free from CTS control and could not be allowed to land and say, “What Arabs? There were no Arabs on board. We had to regain control of the aircraft from Rabbi Zakheim’s remote control system.”

Anyone who would accuse me of being anti-Semitic for mentioning Rabbi Zakheim and thinks I made up those CNN passenger and crew lists can leave a comment and I will publish the list so we can all judge for ourselves who is lying.

I am not anti-Semitic. I did not mention that John Wilkes Booth and Donald Rumsfeld were Jewish.

While we are on the subject of 911, I would like to dispense with the lie that two airliners filled with jet fuel took down World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7. Please note there were 2 planes and 3 towers that fell down that day. Tower 7 was 47 stories high and was never hit by a plane but it did collapse in 6.5 seconds.

The first thing to point out before watching a video of WTC 7 collapsing is that not one window melted. This is amazing considering that windows melt at 800 degrees Fahrenheit or 426.66 Celsius. Steel melts at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,204.44 Celsius. This would suggest either an intelligent fire that avoided the windows and consciously chose to melt the steel girders from all 47 stories simultaneously or a controlled demolition.

An intelligent fire is not likely.

You could Google WTC + nanothermite and discover that thermite is a metal oxide invented in the 19th century and used by welders to greatly increase their flame by adding oxygen to cut metals.

Nanothermite has a much greater surface area in relation to its volume. If you spray nanothermite on steel girders and ignite it remotely, then you can collapse an entire building in seconds without melting the glass. Nanothermite burns at over 5,200 degrees Fahrenheit or 2,871.11 Celsius and cuts through steel girders in seconds.

Unfortunately for the TV 911 hucksters, Nanothermite is only available from Above Top Secret military labs in the US and Israel.

Traces of nanothermite were found in the rubble at 911 by many well respected researchers. I should also mention that more than 400,000 cubic yards of concrete were transformed into fine dust in a matter of seconds. That could not be done by anything less than very advanced weapons available only to a few governments.

You can’t buy either nanothermite or advanced military explosives on EBAY from a cave in Afghanistan.

Before leaving the subject of 911, I would like to mention Jane Stanley, the BBC and WTC 7. The BBC presenter in London announced that they had just received word that a third building had collapsed in New York on 911 and switched to Jane Stanley. You can see WTC 7 clearly still standing in the background behind Ms Stanley.

Yet she prattled on for several minuted before BBC cut away from her. She calls WTC 7 the Solomon building. BBC later admitted that they had been informed prematurely by Reuters that WTC 7 had collapsed.

England had just come off Summer Time but America was still on Daylight Savings which could account for the mistake in time differences.

An anti-Semite would point out that the Rothschilds own Reuters and Associated Press. An Anti-Semite would ask why no Rothschild was called before the 911 Commission and asked how he knew WTC 7 was going to collapse half an hour or more before it did fall down?

I would like to discuss the myth of free trade next. In 1994 the Congress and Bill Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the WTO. China devalued their currency and American jobs have been fleeing ever since.

Since 2000 43,000 American manufacturing plants have been closed. The US has over 3,000 counties and 300 million people so the average county has around 100,000 people and lost 14 manufacturing plants.

I believe this de-industrialization has been deliberate so America can more easily be conquered. The people who think they own you and your government do not like you, the Bill of Rights and your stinking democracy.

They want you to lose WW III.

The next lie has to be the whole Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) fraud and the banker Bailouts. Depending on how you count it, the Bailout to date has cost us more than 27 trillion dollars. These bailouts were never intended to cure the recession and to create jobs for anyone outside Wall Street.

Of course you have not paid off the whole of the 27 trillion dollar Bailout bill. The remainder will be paid by you when the price of food doubles, triples and quadruples.

Blythe Masters invented Credit Default Swaps (CDS) while she was still working at JP Morgan’s London office. A CDS is a hybrid between insurance and a derivative which is a bet on the future value of a bond or a commodity.

Today there are 1.5 quadrillion dollars worth of CDS out there. The only guarantee for their payment in case of failure is your ability as a taxpayer to increase the amount of taxes you pay by a thousand or two thousand percent.

Blythe and CDS made the MBS fraud possible. It is illegal to sell securities that you know to be worthless. It is illegal to give mortgages to people you know had no ability to pay.

I once knew an Asian woman with a job paying ten dollars an hour. Her husband refused to work more than one month every two years. They were illegal aliens and had three children to support. She told her mortgage brokers she did not earn enough money to make the payments. But they told her they would loan her enough money to make the payments so she signed the loan agreement.

This is fraudulent inducement.

But think of the New York bankers who supported NAFTA and knew more than 15 million jobs were going away. They knew that people were taking out loans they intended to pay from the wages they were earning. And the bankers knew those jobs were leaving the country never to return.

That was fraudulent inducement on a massive scale.

These loans were obviously bad loans and could not be sold except as part of a bond that was guaranteed by one of Blythe’s CDS. AIG could sell a lot of CDS and give an absolutely worthless junk bond a AAA rating. This enabled the sale of fraudulent loans.

Many of these mortgages were split up into several different bonds so the bankers could sell the same home loan several times. This also is a fraud. It is no more legal for a banker to sell one home five times than it is for your neighbor to sell his car to five different people.

In 1999 Brooksley Born was head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). She tried to regulate CDS because they would otherwise bankrupt America.

However, four men came to her office and told her not to worry her pretty little head about hundreds of trillions of dollars in potential liabilities to the taxpayers. In that same year the Congress repealed Glass Steagall so the bankers could maximize their fraud and avoid what little regulation there was.

An anti-Semite would mention that the four men (Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Arthur Levitt) who told Ms Born she could not protect billions of people around the world from trillions of dollars in fraud were all Jewish.

You must understand that the people who steal money by the trillions are important. All those people who have to wake up in the morning and go to work to pay for the Bailouts are of no consequence even if they die of starvation or in a war defending the banks, the oil companies and Israel.

Last year Ben Bernanke was forced to reveal that he created 12.3 trillion dollars in temporary checking account money so he could buy back 6.3 trillion dollars in MBS from the Europeans to keep a lot of criminal bankers out of jail.

Since there was less than 9 trillion dollars in circulation, all that money created for the Bailouts has been inflationary. Blythe Masters is currently VP for Global Commodities at JP Morgan. She is running up the price of gas and food to a point where half the people in the US will soon have to either stop eating or refuse to pay their bills. Millions will not be able to buy food even if they don’t pay their bills.

But the important point is that Blythe Masters is a billionaire. She is only going to make fifty cents to a dollar for every person who dies of starvation but making money is how Wall Street keeps score.

The next lie is that there is an anti-war Left in America resisting all these wars. There is no such animal. On March 19th the US fired 112 missiles at a Muslim nation.

Even Matt Drudge had a headline saying War Number 3. I did not see anyone on the Left get on TV and mention the fact that March 19th was the 8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

But then Veterans for Peace were all locked up in jail for protesting the Iraq war at the White House so they have an excused absence.

I should mention that Martin Luther King was assassinated on the anniversary of his famous anti-war speech at Riverside church as a warning to us all not to oppose all those wars Wall Street and Israel have arranged to kill you and your children.

While on this topic, I should tell you that the Zionists and Wall Street want America to lose WW III. As I already said, If they wanted you to win the next war, they would not have sent all your jobs and industries overseas.

We cannot fight wars without the permission of China and Russia. We have to borrow money to buy the things we no longer make. If China says, sit then the American dog must sit. But that too was by design.

What bankers and Israel want America to do is to attack Syria and Iran, kill a few hundred million Muslims, steal the oil for Israel and lose the war so Americans cannot demand the return of the tens of trillions of dollars the bankers stole from you.

Do you understand that bankers despise you, your family and any nation to which you pledge your allegiance?

Perhaps I should end my list of lies with a general statement about the environment. The bankers hijacked the environmentalist movement as they did the peaceniks.

I saw an article about a plume of oil more than a hundred miles long on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico just recently. The press corps has not asked Obama anything about this yet.

Where is Helen Thomas when we need her?

There is an oil industry practice known as fracking. The oil well drillers send pressure down a pipe beneath the surface of the earth, fracturing it and releasing oil from the shale deposits underground.

On dry land fracking pollutes drinking water and endangers human health. On the surface of the sea bed this practice can fracture the earth and send a few billion barrels of oil to the surface.

Not to worry. The government and the oil companies can dump a lot of toxic Correxit into the Gulf of wherever and poison millions of people. When it comes to poisons, out of sight is out of mind at least as far as the banks and oil companies are concerned.

Did you know that Joe Stalin was the first man in history to use fluoride to make inmates docile? Hitler copied Stalin and the US government thought so highly of their concentration camps that they put fluoride into our water.

So what if fluoride causes bone cancer. At least the peasants aren’t chasing bankers with pitchforks.

If you want to learn what vaccines are really doing, Google “brain eating vaccines” .

This is not an exhaustive list of the lies you must believe to function as a loyal supporter of the Empire.

If you are thinking a slave’s rebellion will improve your future, please realize it will not work until the unemployment rate hits 30%.

That will happen soon enough so we need to hammer away at the lies. There are the tens of trillions of dollars stolen from us, the inflation and the Debt Bomb designed to steal our money, the wars and the environmental poisons put in place to kill us.

Some people only care about one or more of the above issues. Hammer away at the issues they do care about. Explain the issues they do not understand. Inform them about the money stolen through mortgage fraud and Bailouts.

Explain to them why JFK and MLK were assassinated.

Explain to them that just as all roads led to Rome under the Caesars so all roads laden with corruption, treason betrayal and lies in the modern world lead to Israel.

We will soon reach a critical point where the lies will melt down the foundations of this Empire and free the slaves.

Make sure to listen just a few minutes in to our President's words as he campaigned for the office he now holds.

The applause from the audience demonstrates that the American people want torture to stop, the wars to stop - etc... Hence his election.

If you are not angry after watching this video, that is, if you were one of those who voted for the mystery man - I don't know what can help awaken you.

If you are pro-war and didn't vote for him since he pledged to end the wars and the torture - I wonder why you don't love the man - since he has done nothing but continue the insane war policies of the previous corrupter-in-chief. What's NOT to like about him if you want to keep Gitmo open, continue wars based upon lies based upon torture. Why not like a guy who goes to bat for the banks with your tax-bailout money - while letting your property be taken from you during difficult financial times with no relief for you?

Something is rotten in the District. Everybody is waking up to the alarming reality that we no longer have a functioning government.

If you don't believe me, ask how a UN resolution to bomb Libya can commit U.S. troops anywhere when only Congress has the power to declare war according to the United States Constitution? The only conclusion one can logically reach is that our government is a facade. The Constitution is blatantly ignored. The people are left to fend for themselves as the public treasury is looted and private property is confiscated.

This is an important video that may remind you how we got to where we are right now. No - it's not the fault of the people of the United States for what is going on - after all they voted for the opposite of what they got. It's the fault of the liars and political manipulators that led Americans into a trap. But it will have to be the people that fix this.

Awakening to the phony left vs. right fraud is an important realization that will bring us together to get our common goals accomplished. There is always room for disagreement on certain issues - but it is important not to let the propagandists manipulate us with the divisive issues that are dragged out of the closet every election cycle.

Yes - abortion and gay rights and guns are used as dividers. But we need to see through this smokescreen first to get to the core of our problems. The wars are bankrupting our nation. Yet they are not mentioned much in the mainstream media. Why? As always - who benefits?

The revolution has begun whether you like it or not. If you are a newcomer - you'd better get busy getting caught up on who has been benefitting as you've been losing. That's always a great place to start. Once motive can be seen, one can move on to means and opportunity. All you have to do is look. The information is there.

The decentralized peaceful civil disobedience method is the name of the game today. The more voices the better - hopefully we can get our government back under control before things actually do turn violent.

It is ironic that the only people who do not yet realize that we are living in a dictatorship are the professional liars in the media and the lemmings in Congress. Poor Webb. I wonder what it's like being him - just kind of bumbling around talking with a paid omitter in the media about this myth that our government has checks and balances. One such mythical check is the "power of the purse" - where Congress can take away the dictator's money - but why do that when the merchants of death that got our "representatives" into office in the first place will be the first to feel the pain?

Our "representatives" are out of excuses - and as the pictures of the death and destruction sown by American arms paid for with my tax money trickle in - it is obvious that we are indeed simply living in a dictatorship.

We can all wake up now to the realization that if Congress cannot stop the Executive on this matter of undeclared and unending and undefinable war chasing ghosts - regardless of which actor presently occupies the Oval Office - regardless of which phony political party/front said dictator has adopted as a cover - we are doomed as a free nation.

The blatancy with which the Executive branch acts and has acted for years demonstrates a true lack of fear of the Congress - and of the people of the United States. The total disregard for the United States Constitution is out in the open - and it is becoming impossible even for the Pentagon lie factory to hide.

If Congress, and that means Webb and the rest of them, don't act now - there will be no more point in the debate regarding what needs to be done. The public will finally realize that they are the final check on the out-of-control U.S. federal government.

Nothing I am saying is news to those of us who have followed our descent into dictatorship. War now in Libya. Undeclared and undebated by Congress - but gee willikers - the UN said it's OK. Talk about stupid.

Once more the bullets fly, the kids die, the missiles flash, the bombs crash, the blood spills, the cash tills... and .........nothing. Just more war. Syria and Iran are likely already in the making. But this is impossible for a Congressperson to grasp. Their mental capacity toggles between catering to the rich, pissing away money, deciding how they want their filet cooked, and which wines they haven't yet tried on the wine list.

Since the dictator-handlers know the American public will eventually awaken from their trance one day - it will necessitate yet a new, new "Pearl Harbor-like Event" - and the cycle of violence can begin again - as Congressional and the American public herds are stampeded off the next crisis-cliff. And naturally and as usual - this crisis will REQUIRE that their unalienable rights be smashed to death upon impact.

Yes - it is interesting indeed to watch Webb and the rest of them dawdle while our new World War dawns with the punctuality of a rising sun. I can only imagine the yet-unwritten list of the dead sure to come on all sides of this conflict. I doubt any of the names will include the international bankers, arms dealers, or other merchants of death standing ready to profit from the sales of everything from bombs, bullets and bodybags. Somehow the grisly nature of the human slaughter business hasn't reached the minds of the masses. It certainly hasn't done much to move Congress.

Thanks to all in government - Congress especially - for your blindness to reality. For your sugar-coating of the war industry, and your never-ending "patriotism" and "support" for our troops.

Oh Congress - just remember how easy things could have been had you only acted when there was still time. If only you'd paid attention to those warning you of the patterns in public affairs - that there really are conspiracies that involve power and control. If only you'd read a history book and something sank in.

Yes, a Rubicon has been crossed as the dictators of today escape those entrusted to keep them on a short leash. Let's all hope they realize the monster is loose before it's too late to put the collar back on.

Some in Congress know how dangerous this situation is - who will team up? Will Webb team up with them?

Monday, March 7, 2011

After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

For over 200 years, young Americans have risked and lost life and limb fighting for the principles of Democracy and freedom this nation was founded on, and to please their Israeli masters the US Government has just lightly cast aside everything those soldiers were crippled and killed to preserve. Obama and Israel's lackeys in Congress just spit in the face of every man and woman in uniform who joined the military to preserve the principles of Democracy, and now may find themselves ordered to protect a dictator.

"We have always been at war with Eastasia" -- 1984

If the US Government is willing to turn their backs on Democracy in other nations when Israel commands it; do you think they will hesitate to turn their backs on Democracy in this country when Israel demands it?

Please share this treason against the founding principles of the United States with everyone you know. I am going to keep this story at the top of the page for a while today." -- What Really Happened

Thursday, March 3, 2011

"A unionized public employee, a tea party activist and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy... he wants a piece of your cookie!"-- Wake the Flock Up

It would really be funny were it not so true.

"The Perfidy of Government: Evidence v. Denial

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
March 2, 2011

This essay is about three recent books that explain how we lost our economy, the Constitution and our civil liberties, and how peace lost out to war.

Matt Taibbi is the best — certainly the most entertaining — financial/political reporter in the country. There is no better book than Griftopia (2010) to which to turn to understand how stupidity, greed, and criminality, spread evenly among policymakers and Wall Street, created the financial crisis that has left Americans overburdened with both private and public debt. Taibbi walks the reader through the fraudulent financial instruments that littered the American, British, and European financial communities with toxic waste. He has figured it all out, and what in other hands might be an arcane account for MBAs is, in Taibbi’s hands, a highly readable and entertaining story.

For the first 65 pages, Taibbi entertains the reader with the inability of the public and politicians to focus on any reality. The financial story begins on page 65 with Fed chairman Alan Greenspan undermining the Glass-Steagall Act leading to its repeal by three political stooges, Gramm-Leach-Bliley. This set the stage for the banksters to leverage debt upon debt until the house of cards collapsed. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to do her regulatory job and regulate derivatives, the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission got her bounced out of office. To make certain that no other regulator could protect the financial system and its participants from what was coming, Congress deregulated the derivatives markets by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

As an Ayn Randian mentality of a self-regulating private sector crowded out prudence, the media cheered. Taibbi captures the era in a sentence: “In was in the immediate wake of all these historically disastrous moves — printing 1.7 trillion new dollars in the middle of a massive stock bubble, dismantling the Glass-Steagall Act, deregulating the derivatives market, blowing off his regulatory authority in the middle of an era of rampant fraud — that Greenspan was upheld by the mainstream financial and political press as a hero of almost Caesarian nature. In February 1999, Time magazine put him on the cover.”

Mortgage securitization allows lenders such as banks to issue mortgages that can be sold to third parties. Instead of making money from the interest from mortgages in its portfolio, the bank issues mortgages for a fee and sells the mortgages. The mortgages are then combined with mortgages sold by other lenders and resold to investors. This development resulted in lenders being less interested in the credit-worthiness of borrowers.

In order to assure investors about credit-worthiness and to appeal to risk-tolerant hedge funds, the next development was to take a pool of mortgages of varying credit-worthiness and to organize them into three tranches. The mortgages were separated into AAA, B grade, and high-risk stuff. The triple A tranche could be sold to pension funds and institutional investors. Hedge funds would take the high-risk tranche for the high-interest rate that they offered, intending to get rid of the mortgages before they had time to go bad. The middle tranche was the one hard to sell. The interest rate on the B-grade tranche was not high enough to appeal to hedge funds, and pension funds were restricted to investment grade.

So what did the banks do? Well, they lumped together all the B-grade tranches and started the process all over. The best of the lot were turned into — you guessed it — AAA, then came the B grade, and then the worst of the lot became the third tranche. And then the process was repeated.

This was bad enough, but even worse was happening. Many of the triple A and B grade mortgages had that rating only because of fraudulent credit scores and rating agencies assigning investment grade ratings to lower grade mortgages. Everyone was focused on short-term profits, from the lenders who churned out mortgages for fees to hedge funds that had no intention of holding the high-risk tranches beyond the short-run. You can see how toxic waste was spread throughout the financial system.

Then it became possible to “insure” the AAA mortgages (many of which were not AAA). Once this happened, financial institutions that were required to maintain reserves against deposits or to capitalize obligations, such as insurance policies, could now substitute higher-paying mortgage derivatives for U.S. Treasury notes and still meet their reserve requirements for a ready cash reserve. Treasury notes are so liquid that they are considered the equivalent of cash, and insured AAA-securitized mortgages acquired similar status.

AIG became the big provider of “insurance” in an operation run by Joe Cassano. Cassano’s “insurance” product is called a credit default swap. It is not insurance, because AIG did not set aside capital to pay any claims. And claims there would be. Not only were the AAA mortgages that were being insured littered with toxic waste, investment banks and hedge funds could purchase swaps against mortgages that they did not even own. As Taibbi puts it, people were gambling in a casino in which gamblers did not have to cover their bets or own the financial instruments that they were insuring.

While Cassano was collecting fees for bets that he could not cover, Win Neuger on the other side of AIG was lending the insurance giant’s long-term portfolio of sound investments to short-sellers for a fee.

Short-selling works like this: A short-seller thinks a company’s stock price is going to fall in value. He borrows the stock from AIG by putting up collateral equal to its market price the day the stock is borrowed plus a small fee, sells the stock, pockets the money and waits for the stock to fall. If his hunch or inside information is correct, and the stock falls in value, he buys the stock and returns it to AIG, pocketing the difference in the two prices.

Normally, people who lend stock to short-sellers are content with the fee and with the interest on the collateral (cash) invested in safe instruments like Treasury bills. The lender of the stock cannot take any risk with the cash collateral, because the cash must be returned to the short-seller when he returns the borrowed stock.

Once, however, toxic waste got AAA ratings plus insurance from Cassano, higher-paying insured investment grade toxic waste could displace of US Treasuries as a place for Neuger to hold the short-sellers’ collateral. You can see the untenable position into which Cassano and Neuger put AIG.

Enter Goldman Sachs as a buyer of swaps from Cassano and a borrower of stocks from Neuger. Once the real estate bubble that the crazed Federal Reserve had caused popped, all the fraud that had been disguised by rising real estate prices appeared in its naked glory. AIG couldn’t cover Cassano’s swaps, and it could not return the collateral to short-sellers that Neuger had invested, unknowingly, in toxic waste.

This was the origin of the TARP bailout, which was perceived by Goldman Sachs (whose former executives, as Taibbi relates, controlled the U.S. Treasury, financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve) as an opportunity not merely to have U.S. taxpayers make good on its exploitation of AIG, but also to fund with free capital supplied by hapless taxpayers more money-making opportunities for “banks too big to fail.”

As Taibbi shows, Goldman Sachs had yet more ruin to bring to Americans. Goldman Sachs managed to get the position limits that regulation imposed on speculators in order to prevent speculation from taking over commodity markets (for example, grains, metals, and oil) secretly repealed. This allowed Goldman Sachs to create a new product, index speculation, which brought hundreds of billions into commodities markets and drove up the price of gasoline in 2008 to $4.50 per gallon despite the fact that there was no change in supply or consumer demand. It was entirely a profit rip-off from speculation in oil futures contracts.

From here on Taibbi’s book really rolls. If the U.S. had a media worthy of the name, instead of mere shills for private oligarchs and propagandists for government, Matt Taibbi would be the editor of an independent Wall Street Journal with a regiment of investigative reporters. Then Americans would have a prospect of reclaiming their country and their economy....

"What is the perfect way to get the eyes of the American people off of the real economic problems that this country is facing? Get them fighting with each other of course. And what is one issue that is sure to get the left and the right screaming at each other like cats and dogs? Unions. The battle over collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin has been making headlines around the world for weeks and there are no signs that it is going to end any time soon. In fact, Mordecai Lee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that it is "a battle to the death".

The Democrats that have gone AWOL appear to be absolutely determined to stay away. The protesters seem equally determined to keep on fighting. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker does not look like he plans to back down either.

Meanwhile, both sides are calling each other the most horrible names. "Hitler", "Stalin", "Nazi" and "fascist" are just a few of the terms that are being thrown around by both sides. What has been going on in Wisconsin has captured the imagination of the entire nation and it is creating even more hate between the left and the right in this country. Unfortunately, as the economic pie in this nation continues to shrink, economic battles such as the one in Wisconsin are going to become quite common.

In fact, the war over public unions seems to be spreading. The Ohio Senate has just passed a law that bans public employees from ever going on strike and that forbids them from negotiating on issues such as health care, sick time and pension benefits with the state government.

Needless to say, public employees and union workers in Ohio are not amused.
Several other states are now looking at legislation that would restrict the collective bargaining rights of public employees. Battle lines are being drawn all over the nation.

If you only read conservative websites about all of this, you would be tempted to believe that all union activists are Satanic communists that hate everything that is true and good about America.

If you only read liberal websites about these protests, you would be tempted to believe that all conservatives are heartless Nazi-loving bastards that want to give all the money in America to the rich.

But this is what the establishment loves to do - they love to "divide and conquer" and have us fighting with each other like cats and dogs.

In a recent column, Pat Buchanan described some of the vitriol that has been directed towards Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently....

Picketers have carried placards with the face of Gov. Scott Walker in the cross hairs of a gun sight. He has been compared to Hitler, Mussolini, Mubarak. Democrats have fled the state to deny the elected Wisconsin Senate a quorum to vote.

If you even bring up the name "Scott Walker" with some people they will look at you as if you just mentioned the devil.

Not that our public officials are doing much to help tone down the debate. U.S. Representative Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) certainly took the rhetoric up a notch when he recently told a group of union workers in Boston the following....

"Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."

Sadly, this is what politics is turning into in America. You identify the "enemy" and then you hate them with everything that you have inside of you.

Meanwhile, the real sources of our economic problems are never addressed.

Whether the unions win this current battle or the conservatives win this current battle it isn't really going to do much at all to solve the underlying problems that our economy is facing.

For example, most of the people up in Wisconsin probably cannot adequately describe what the Federal Reserve actually is or how it is systematically destroying our national wealth.

The Federal Reserve was designed to get the U.S. government enslaved to a perpetually expanding national debt. This national debt is a massive drain on the wealth of this country and it is literally strangling our economy to death.

In addition, the Federal Reserve is continually destroying the value of our national currency. The U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and the pace of dollar devaluation is rapidly accelerating.

But do high profile Democrats or high profile Republicans ever talk about doing something about the Federal Reserve?

Of course not.

Another reason why America's "economic pie" is shrinking is because of the deindustrialization of this nation that is being caused by globalism.

Back in 1980, manufacturing represented 21 percent of U.S. GDP. By 2008, that number had dropped to 13 percent.

Back in 1980, 31 percent of all of the manufacturing in the world was done in the United States. By 2008, that number had dropped to 24 percent.

Between December 2000 and December 2010, the U.S. ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars. In order to fund that shortfall we had to borrow massive amounts of money from the rest of the world.

The truth is that the U.S. is running a trade deficit in almost every major industry that you can think of.

For example, do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe? Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

Ouch.

Well, what about high technology? Aren't we supposed to be the innovators of the globe?

Well, in 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in "advanced technology products" of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans have been shipping our factories and our jobs overseas for decades.

Neither major party has been standing up for the American worker.

Instead, both the Democrats and the Republicans have been doing the dirty work of the globalists.

But instead of demanding change, American workers keep voting for the exact same politicians over and over and over.

As the federal budget deficit continues to grow and as the U.S. trade deficit continues to grow, America's "economic pie" is going to continue to get smaller.

Sadly, even though the overall economic pie is shrinking, Wall Street and the gigantic corporations that dominate our economy have managed to carve out even bigger pieces of the pie for themselves.

That leaves the rest of us with fewer scraps to fight over than ever.

According to CNN, in 2009 the wealthiest 10% of all Americans controlled half of all the wealth in America.

Not only that, the average CEO now makes approximately 185 times more money than the average American worker.

Remember, the wealthy are thriving even as the overall economic pie is getting smaller.

So what we have today is a very small group that is doing very well while most of America is suffering. As 2007 began, only about 26 million Americans were on food stamps, but today over 43 million Americans are on food stamps.

Frustration and anger are growing from coast to coast as millions upon millions of Americans find themselves unable to pay their mortgages and feed their families.

But instead of the American people coming together and standing up to Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, we are endlessly fighting with ourselves.

The establishment loves that most Americans are caught in the false left/right paradigm.

The establishment loves that hatred between liberal and conservatives is rising.

The establishment loves that we are fighting with each other over the scraps instead of asking why the pie is shrinking and why most of the pie is being taken by the elite.

The left and the right are fighting tooth and nail to win minor battles against each other even as our national economy slowly swirls down towards the bottom of the toilet bowl.

Hopefully the American people will wake up. Our economic system is being looted and gutted at an astounding pace and most of our politicians appear to be totally indifferent to what is going on.

But instead of getting educated about real issues, most Americans that are interested in politics seem obsessed with finding someone to hate. The mainstream media tells us that if we are Republicans that we are supposed to hate the Democrats and that if we are Democrats that we are supposed to hate the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the real criminals are having a field day and they are getting away with just about whatever they want to do.

About Me

All material published for educational purposes under Fair Use Doctrine.
Warning: Some commentaries may include profanity. I offer my apologies in advance for those who may be offended by the harsh language in response to outrageous lies.